NVIDIA Legacy Driver Updates For X Server 1.7

While many of the distributions arriving this autumn and winter are shipping with an X Server 1.6 build rather than the new X Server 1.7, if you are using Fedora 12 or another distribution shipping with the latest X.Org 7.5 packages, there is good news if you are a customer of NVIDIA's older graphics hardware.

NVIDIA hasn't updated its three legacy drivers (the 71.xx.xx, 96.xx.xx, and 173.xx.xx series) since this past July when delivering various bug-fixes and new kernel support, they have updated two of their legacy drivers this week. The new releases are 173.14.22 and 96.43.14, which NVIDIA has tagged as legacy pre-releases, and both drivers now contain X Server 1.7 support along with an updated nvidia-installer to detect newer Debian distributions that use /usr/lib32 instead of /emul/ia32-linux as the 32-bit library path. That's it though for the official changes, but at least there's updates still coming out, considering NVIDIA's official open-source stack remains limited and obfuscated and Nouveau isn't yet ready for prime-time use.

As of right now, NVIDIA has not updated its 71.xx.xx display driver to offer new X Server compatibility nor do they have plans to provide an update.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.